Understanding Your Short-term and Long-term Goals
For decades, marketing strategies have been used by companies all over the world to help increase visibility, sales, or a similar target. Typically, an ROI (Return on Investment) is measured to help determine the success or efficiency of the marketing campaign. Traditionally, the ROI is measured by monetary investment via an increase in revenue, but as we move towards a more technologically advanced age, where conversions and traffic increases are major goals, it can become harder to understand where ROI measurements fit into digital marketing campaigns.
For some small businesses, it can become somewhat confusing trying to navigate the various aspects of digital marketing such as link-building. In particular, trying to measure the analytics and determine what is working and what isn’t can be difficult if you are unfamiliar with certain SEO tactics.
However, because measuring ROI on link-building campaigns and other digital marketing tools is crucial to your digital marketing campaign, it’s important to find a consultant or marketing team that can help you understand how to successfully read your results.
Thankfully, there are tons of tools available online to help. In particular, Google Analytics is a free web marketing tool that can help you get the most of our campaign. It’s important to first measure the ROI of all aspects of your marketing campaign – without this, any effort put into tracking your links will be in vain.
Let’s Talk About Link-Building
Link-building campaigns are an integral part of any SEO or digital marketing campaign. Having inbound links on external, authoritative sites can be an excellent way to increase the value of your website in the eyes of Google and other search engines. There are many ways to implement a link-building campaign, but it can be difficult to measure them all – especially if you have toxic backlinks you don’t even know about.
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In addition to boosting your overall ranking on SERPs like Google and Bing, building quality links on the internet can help boost referral traffic to your site. For example, if someone is looking through a site about real estate in their local area, finding a link back to your real estate blog can be a great way to bring prospective clients to your site! When backed with great content, a user-friendly interface, and an attention-grabbing CTAs, this can help lead to conversions on your site and an increase in revenue.
The trouble is, link-building can be hard to navigate if you’re not sure where to start or what type of site to reach out to in hopes of building a type of collaboration or industry relationship. This is why trusting an expert is not just recommended, it can be your ticket to success.
How to Measure Link-Building Success
Some agencies claim that measuring the ROI of a link-building campaign can be difficult, and while this is true in some capacity, it can also be because they are looking at it from an entirely different perspective.
The Search Engine Journal (and our team), on the other hand, believe that ROI can be measured in two simple ways: short and long term metrics.
The Short-Term Method
It’s important to remember that, with most link-building campaigns, improvements won’t likely be seen in a matter of days. Instead, engagement and ROI should be measured over months and, eventually, years. However, many clients wish to see how their campaigns are doing in their introductory stages, as this can sometimes give an idea of the initial ROI and whether a link-building campaign is projected to be successful. Unfortunately, many short-term metrics in this area are limited, since it can take time to build a successful outbound link campaign, but here are a few tips to helping generate short-term measurements.
First things first, focus on the how. That is to say, how you are planning to improve traffic (or whatever your immediate goal is) with your link-building campaign. This can help you develop a sense of where to look for input based on what you are putting out.
For example, try generating links to one piece of content on your site, such as a blog or article, and focus on the ROI of that one page to start. That allows you to look at a screenshot of traffic to that specific page, say 90 days before and after, to deliver a rough idea of whether your link building is generating an improvement in traffic.
Of course, figuring out your ROI in terms of monetary success versus click-through rates or ranking higher on SERPs can be trickier. However, we like to think if this is possible with other areas of content marketing, it can be possible with link-building, too. You’ll have to have Google Analytics set up correctly – we recommend talking to an expert if you need help with this part – otherwise you may not be getting an accurate reading.
The Long-Term Method
Measuring the ROI of link-building in terms of dollar amounts gets trickier as time passes, since there are so many aspects to measure – and so many places your links end up that you may not even realize! At this point, it’s crucial to look at the campaign from a “big picture” perspective and begin creating a long-term plan for success. Over the course of six months to several years, clients should be measuring the success of their link-building campaigns based on how well it improves your site’s reputation. This can be especially difficult if you’re already near the top, as it takes a much greater magnitude of effort to see results over time.
Rather than trying to measure in terms of financial ROI, using organic click-through-rates, maintaining high page ranks and page authority may be a great way to evaluate your link building campaign long term.
You can improve this score by generating backlinks to your page from high-end sites and platforms. It takes time to make it onto the list, but it can be a worthwhile way to significantly improve your page’s overall ranking on SERPs.
You can also look at impressions for a long-term evaluation of link building efforts, but it’s important to break these down accurately, as not every impression equals a page view.
Need Help Building Quality Links?
At Clicc Media Inc, we work closely with clients across various businesses to help develop a tailored digital marketing plan that meets your unique needs. We can help with boosting traffic to a blog, increasing engagement on social media sites, and even connecting with your clients through video.
We believe that clients should be spending the time and effort on building their clientele and growing their business, not navigating search engines and trying to understand hyperlinks! Contact us today to learn more about our SEO solutions.